Kansas Lurks Back to Normalcy

The Kansas economy has lately been swelled by the expense accounts of big city newspaper reporters, as much of the national media have rushed to our usually overlooked state to cover its Senate race. There’s no wondering why there’s a national interest in the story, as it could wind up determining which party controls the Senate, and it provides some reason for the reporters to hope that it will  be the Democrats who somehow prevail, and it is a most intriguing tale. The latest developments are more hopeful to the Republicans, however, and even the most partisan presses seem to have noticed.

Ordinarily even the reporters in Wichita and Topeka wouldn’t get out of their newsrooms to cover a Senate race in Kansas, which hasn’t sent anything other than a Republican to Washington since that one time everyone lost their minds early in the New Deal and Dust Bowl days, but this is not an ordinary year. Long-time incumbent Sen. Pat Roberts has been around a long enough time to have found disfavor with the Republican party’s anti-incumbent mood, and he barely survived a challenge to a little known and under-funded and underwhelming neophyte with a Facebook scandal only because a couple of crank candidates split the majority of the party’s throw-the-bums-out vote. Roberts then went into a three-way general election adorned with the out-of-touch and out-of-state label stuck upon him in the primary, hoping that another split of the anti-Roberts vote would save him, but the Democrats went to court insisting that they shouldn’t be compelled to run a candidate just because their party had gone to the expensive trouble of nominating one, and it was suddenly plausible that a well-heeled and largely self-financed independent candidate who was running on an appealing platform of common sense solutions and bipartisanship would win. That the most reliably Republican state in the Union over the past century and a half might allow the Democrats to retain control of the Senate was a tantalizing possibility, and thus the influx of national media to Kansas.

What they’ve found, however, is an impressive all-out effort by the Republicans that casts doubt on the upset storyline. Local newscasts have been saturated with advertisements for Roberts, almost all of which make the essential point that a Republican loss could allow the Democrats to retain control of the Senate, complete with scary pictures of the wildly unpopular President Barack Obama. There are also radio ads that combat the unfortunately true charge from the primary that Roberts hasn’t had a legitimate Kansas residence for years by touting his Kansas birth and Marine service and twangy-gravelly voice and weather-beaten visage and generally conservative voting record to remind voters that he’s still a Kansas kind of guy. Our internet browsing keeps popping up ads from the National Rifle Association touting Robert’s support for Second Amendment rights, the spots running on the local right-wing talk radio stations sound tailored to the concerns of those staunch conservatives who might be tempted to stay at home rather than for a man whose lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union is a mere 86 percent, and such anti-establishment heroes as former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin have taken to the hustings to shore up the base. With the Democrats successfully suing in court to avoid the ignominy of a third place finish the anti-Roberts vote won’t be split, but that and the annoying minority of Kansas’ liberals full-throated support for the indendepent have made it easier to portray him as the de facto Democrat in a state where the Democrats are begging to be left of the ballot.

Meanwhile, independent Greg Orman’s campaign has seemed unready for both Roberts’ sudden aggressiveness and the inevitable scrutiny that falls upon a frontrunner even when he’s front-running against a Republican. At first he tried to dodge the question of whether he would caucus with the Democrats and potentially retain their control of the Senate, then said he’d join whichever side held a clear majority on his inauguration day, and is now trying out the line that it doesn’t much matter which party controls the Senate. He’s also dodged such obvious questions as whether he’d vote to repeal Obamacare, telling a random curious citizen at a small town parade that it’s an “interesting question,” and has otherwise been vague about what he considers a common sense and bipartisan solution on such issues as gun control and the XL Keystone Pipeline. He can’t deny his past campaign contributions to Obama and Democratic Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid and other hated Democrats, or his past attempt to run for Senate as a Democrat, or the loud support he’s getting from that annoying minority of liberals, and in his rebuttal ads he’s been reduced to saying that Roberts’ criticism of the Obama agenda is “only half right” and that an equal portion of blame should be allotted to those who oppose that agenda. The argument is likely to fall flat with the vast majority of Kansas who express disapproval of Obama, even if it resonates with those confounded low-information voters who don’t stop to think about such claims,  and if Orman has some third way that both parties will follow toward a golden age, he doesn’t explain it in these 30-second spots.

There’s still plenty of time left for an October surprise, and if it comes it will be during a most peculiar election season, but we sense that Kansas is turning back to its traditional Republican form.

— Bud Norman

Terror in the Heartland

Wichita is rarely mentioned in the national news, which is part of the appeal of our humble prairie hometown, but it briefly appeared in the headlines on Friday when a local nutcase allegedly attempted to blow up the city’s main airport.

We use the term “allegedly” only in the in the perfunctory journalistic sense, because everything that has been made public suggests the fellow did indeed attempt to blow up the airport. A complaint filed in federal court charges that the defendant, reportedly a recent convert to Islam whose employment as an avionics technician for one of the local aircraft companies gave him a security clearance to the airport’s tarmac, had expressed a desire to express his enthusiasm for his newfound religion by blowing something up, worked with undercover agents posing as terrorists to acquire explosives, written a suicide note stating his intention to die in the bombing, and then driven what he thought was a working bomb to the airport, where he was promptly arrested by the authorities. Unless it transpires that federal, state, and local law enforcement have conspired to make this all up, or some sort entrapment defense can be made, it seems a solid case.

So thorough was the investigation that all of the involved officials are assuring the public that at no point was there any danger to anyone. The local newspaper reports that there weren’t even any flight delays at the airpor as a result of the incident, which is fortunate for any travelers who were trying to get out of town as it’s a sure bet they had to make a connecting flight to get wherever they were going. This lack of suspense or even inconvenience was no doubt a reason for the relative lack attention paid the plot by the national media, although we suspect that it’s also because they long ago lost interest in reporting on the continuing threat of Islamist terrorism. Such stories offend the multi-cultural sensibilities of the modern press, and usually require a sidebar about the always-threatened but never-realized threat of anti-Muslim backlash, and by now it’s become such drudgery that the average American reporter would even prefer to write about Obamacare. Had the alleged perpetrator been with any of the city’s 440-some Christian churches or the locally robust Republican party it would have stopped the presses, but these days a “lone wolf” Islamist terrorist is just another dog-bites-man story that requires an exculpatory dogs-are-a-species-of-peace sidebar.

What national coverage the story did get couldn’t resist the “terror in the heartland” angle, with the frightening implication that if it could happen here it could anywhere the stories might run. Over in England the venerable Telegraph noted that plot was directed at the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport, finding the moniker a reminder that “this is the American heartland, far away from the usual targets for terrorist plots and breeding grounds for extremism,” but like their American counterparts they underestimate the rich cultural diversity of this city. One of the plotters of the first attempt to blow the World Trade Center in New York City had attended the local state university and become radicalized while attending services at a nearby mosque, and Wichita is as likely a location for a terror plot as anyplace else. The city might be perceived as a soft target, even though we’re subjected to big-city levels of scrutiny anytime we try to enter City Hall to pay a no-seat-belts ticket or get into one of the local arenas for a basketball game, and the propaganda value of a strike in the “nation’s heartland” would probably be as valuable as one in a more populous and prominent city on one of the coasts.

Even here, though, the story has been largely ignored. The local media gave it thorough coverage but not the round-the-clock and fill-the-front-page treatment afforded the occasional abortion flaps or hail storm, and the reports have given it a Wichita flavor that out-of-town outlets can’t comprehend. We were intrigued to note that the alleged perpetrator was a graduate of Wichita Heights High School, our alma mater, and thus joins the BTK serial murderer as one of its more infamous alumni, but we still think Heights is the goodest school in town. Most of the other reported details about the defendant, including his employment with an aircraft company and his slovenly appearance and his inconspicuous residence in a working class neighborhood, all seem very familiar and therefore quite unsettling. It could happen here, apparently, and this does suggest it might happen anywhere.

Foiled terror plots have become so commonplace, though, that they no longer prompt much remark even down the street from where they occur. The conversations in the bars, coffeehouses, and churches we frequent is more likely to turn to the Wichita State Wheatshockers’ 10-and-0 start to the college basketball season, or the recently tolerable weather we’ve been having after a miserable cold snap, or the terror-like damage being wrought by that damned Obamacare, and until such time as the terrorists get lucky the subject will be old news.

— Bud Norman